Cameras such as one-time-use cameras sold by Eastman Kodak Company, Rochester, N.Y. and others have been developed that provide a low-cost combination of a roll of film and a camera. Examples of such cameras are described in commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 6,190,061 entitled “Photographic Film Unit And One-Time-Use Camera, issued Feb. 20, 2001 in the name of DiRisio; U.S. Pat. No. 6,298,200 entitled “Exposure Count Indicator For Camera”, issued Oct. 2, 2001 in the name of Allen et al.; and U.S. Pat. No. 6,304,722 entitled “One-Time-Use Camera With Film Winding Detection To Enable Exposure Related Component”, issued Oct. 16, 2001 in the name of Lawther et al. Such cameras provide quality images at a relatively low cost level that has proven exceptionally popular with consumers. Hundreds of millions of such cameras are sold each year.
However, there is a continuing desire to reduce the cost of photography to a point where it is accessible to a wide variety of consumers. There is a further continuing desire to reduce the size of cameras so that they can be conveniently carried and used.
One way to reduce the cost of one-time-use cameras is to reduce the number of photographic images that can be recorded by such cameras. Specifically, it has been known since the early days of photography to provide cameras that adapted to capture a single image on a photosensitive element. Examples of such cameras are shown and described in U.S. Pat. No. 360,499 entitled “Photographic Apparatus”, issued Apr. 5, 1887 in the name of Whittell; U.S. Pat. No. 1,298,312 entitled “Camera”, issued Mar. 25, 1919 in the name of Earle; and U.S. Pat. No. 1,366,158 entitled “Camera”, issued Jan. 18, 1921 in the name of Brown.
The cameras described in the '499, '312 and 158 patents can be costly to make, as they require manual assembly. Further, the cameras described therein require manual control of the exposure of the photosensitive element and are difficult to operate. In the '499 patent, a user must take manual action to begin exposure and manual action to end exposure. It will be appreciated however, that relying upon human action to control exposure inherently means that exposure time will be substantively longer than the exposure times that are available using conventional mechanical cameras and that are appropriate for still life image capture. What is desired is a camera system that enables image capture with short exposure times so as to allow a camera to be used to capture images of wide variety scene types. Further, it will be appreciated that it is desirable to provide a low cost one-time-use camera that eliminates the possibility of human error in defining the exposure time, so that images captured by such a low cost one-time-use camera provide a predictable exposure time.